Recovery Michigan

In January, almost immediately after she got Medicaid coverage through the Affordable Care Act, she had called a community mental health agency seeking help for the depression and anxiety that had so often consumed her.

Now she was getting therapy for the first time, and it was helping, no question. She just wished she could go more often. The agency, Seven Counties Services, has been deluged with new Medicaid recipients, and Ms. Hall has had to wait up to seven weeks between appointments with her therapist, Erin Riedel, whose caseload has more than doubled.

“She’s just awesome,” Ms. Hall said. “But she’s busy, very busy.”

The lonely brain is different from the non-lonely brain, says John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago and one of the nation’s leading experts on the neurobiology of loneliness. In people like me, who for various reasons are primed to define ourselves as lonely — more on those reasons later — the brain switches easily into self-preservation mode when we’re feeling loneliest, quick to see social danger even when it isn’t there.

States that implemented medical marijuana laws appear to have lower annual opioid analgesic overdoses death rates (both from prescription pain killers and illicit drugs such as heroin) than states without such laws although the reason why is not clear.

States with medical marijuana laws had a 24.8 percent lower average annual opioid overdose death rate compared to states without such laws. In 2010, that translated to about 1,729 fewer deaths than expected. The years after implementation of medical marijuana laws also were associated with lower overdose death rates that generally got stronger over time: year 1 (-19.9 percent), year 2 (-25.2 percent), year 3 (-23.6 percent), year 4 (-20.2 percent), year 5 (-33.7 percent) and year 6 (-33.3 percent).

In the wake of that news, as so often happens with a high-profile suicide, there have been countless explainers, analyses, and ruminations written on the reality of depression and how to deal with it both as a sufferer and a supporter of those dealing with it. These pieces have been illuminating and informative in their own ways, but the coincidentally well-timed release of an unassuming text-based game called Depression Quest has become one of the most gripping and educational views on the subject, at least for me.

Depression Quest has been available as a download for a while now, but it launched on Steam as a free/pay-what-you-want download last week, on the same day as Robin Williams' death (a coincidence creator Zoe Quinn expressed a great deal of ambivalence about). The game plays out like a semi-randomized choose-your-own-adventure book; you read a page of text describing an everyday situation, you choose from a number of decisions for how to deal with it, then you read about the consequences. There are occasional tone-setting still images, some light background music, and ambient noise accents in the background, but for the most part, the game plays out in your imagination.

Can't talk on the phone, and seeking alternative help for emotional crisis? Find e-mental health services including live chat, texting, email, peer support forums, social media, apps, videos, and more, in this international directory (about). Scroll down the page and click the links to connect to supports.

If you're thinking about suicide, please reach out and communicate, using technology you're comfortable with.

There is hope.

Going forward, we need to duplicate the sensitive conversations we were having about the stigma of mental illness, but this time, we need to talk about the stigma of disability. The instinctual responses I saw from people when they learned that Robin Williams had been depressed about being diagnosed with Parkinson’s are part of a “better off dead” stigma that disabled people encounter from others every day. In the Autistic community, we see it played out graphically, month after month, as parents and other caregivers kill Autistic children and adults and onlookers talk about the great difficulty of taking care of Autistic people, the cost, the suffering, the quality of life. So much sympathy goes to the parents who had been “saddled with such a burden” and so little sympathy, outside of the community of Autistics and our allies, goes to the disabled victim.

The research found that 20.8 percent of patients sought prescription pain medications from multiple providers. When compared to patients who continued to receive prescriptions and care from a single provider, the "doctor shoppers":

• Used narcotics four times longer than single provider patients (112 days versus 28 days).
• Obtained a median of seven narcotic prescriptions compared to two prescriptions for single provider patients.
• Had a higher morphine equivalent dose (MED) of narcotics each day (43 milligrams versus 26 milligrams).
• Were 4.5 times more likely to seek out an additional provider if they had a history of preoperative narcotic use.

Illinois medical regulators haveindefinitely suspended the medical licenseof psychiatrist Michael Reinstein, who prescribed more of the most powerful and riskiest antipsychotic drug clozapine than any other doctor in the country.

The state's medical disciplinary board recommended the sanction in May after determining that Reinstein, 71, received "illegal direct and indirect remuneration" from the maker of generic clozapine; did not consider alternative treatments for his patients; and disregarded patients' well-being because of potentially life-threatening side effects of the drug. Reinstein's motion for a rehearing was denied Friday, making the matter public.

Washington’s Supreme Court has unanimously declared it illegal under state law to forcibly detain psychiatric patients in hospital emergency rooms when there’s a lack of available treatment beds in psychiatric wards, reports The News Tribune. The Tribune says such “psychiatric boarding” has “pretty much exploded” across the state in the past seven years, with 3,421 mental patients detained in emergency departments in 2013. “The ruling noted that the state’s civil commitment system has been ‘regularly overwhelmed’ since the Legislature enacted the Involuntary Treatment Act in 1979.”

“The central idea: No vacancy is no excuse,” reports the Tribune. “In the absence of a specific medical need, the state cannot detain people against their will solely to ease overcrowding without providing treatment.”